The Resilient Entrepreneur, Edition #83

Hi there

I hope you had a great week!

Here are the topics in today's edition:

Bigger Isn’t Always Better: Finding Your Growth Projection Style
Why “It’ll Be Done Tomorrow” Never Works Out

Please reach out if you have comments, questions, or suggestions for articles!

Talk soon 👋
Tom

LEADERSHIP FOR RESILIENT ENTREPRENEURS

Bigger Isn’t Always Better: Finding Your Growth Projection Style

Are you an entrepreneur who believes bigger is always better? Or are you more cautious? The good news is that there is more than one road to success.

What fits your business best, a business plan or a cash flow plan?

As a one-man business, a cash flow plan is good enough. Same thing for the early stage of a company.

But once you reach product-market fit, your revenues are 7-digit, and your sales pipeline is stronger than just a few contacts from the founders’ network, projecting the future becomes more important and more feasible.

If you want to attract growth investors or even start to think about an exit, you will need a much more detailed business plan alongside your cash flow plan.

There are two ways to project the future: optimistic or conservative. Both have their advantages and disadvantages, and maybe the style of the business plan also depends on the country in which your business is located: In Switzerland, my home country, people tend to be cautious and discreet; in the United States, things are called bombastic even if they are mediocre.

As the Founder & CEO of Yonder, I have experience with both types of projections. Let’s look into the details.

Optimistic Projections

Optimistic projections are built on modeling the past with actual numbers, calculating some KPIs, and then extrapolating them into the future, using industry-standard values for the core KPIs.

Both revenues and costs are extrapolated into the future, following the logic that if you increase the sales force, sales will also increase.

The result is an impressive growth plan, first and foremost on the top line. But of course, the materialization of this impressive growth plan needs upfront investment.

When using an extrapolation on industry-standard KPIs for your business projection, always remember that you’re basing yourself on historical data. I leave it to you to judge if the past is a good guide for the troubled times we are living in.

Conservative Projections

Conservative projections are built on little upfront investment, and managing your cash needs on funds collected from operating the business. When the forecast becomes more positive than projected, you can make additional investments, but not before.

The result is a less impressive growth plan on the top line, but a much more impressive growth plan on the cost side: People will wonder how much you can achieve with so little.

Furthermore, by constantly adjusting your conservative earnings projection, you can effectively respond to any changes in the macro- and microeconomic environment.

Side-by-Side Comparison

Now for the interesting part. We have modeled our business using both optimistic and conservative methods. Below is a screenshot from our revenue and cost models:

Revenue and cost models in comparison (source: author)

The solid bars show our conservative projection, using the cash flow plan as the basis. The black line shows our optimistic projection, being much more aggressive on the cost side, leading to higher revenues.

Which scenario do you think is more profitable? Here is the EBITDA comparison:

EBITDA models in comparison (source: author)

Surprisingly, the EBITDA is comparable for both models – the black bars represent the conservative projection, and the grey bars represent the optimistic projection.

Conclusion

So, which model is better now, the optimistic or the conservative projection?

It depends on factors such as investors, geographical markets, and personal taste.

But irrespective of what social media tells you about entrepreneurial success, there is more than one way towards success.

INSPIRATION FOR RESILIENT ENTREPRENEURS

Why “It’ll Be Done Tomorrow” Never Works Out

For both simple and complicated tasks, “It’ll be done tomorrow” never works out. Dependencies and different perspectives are to blame.

“Until when can you get this task done?”

“When can we expect an update on this?”

“I need this to be completed by tomorrow.”

We all know those requests from our daily lives. Customers, managers, and even employees want their priorities treated as priorities. But even with the best team, work ethic, and skills, most things take longer than expected. People don’t understand why and get frustrated about delays.

“Why does this take so long?”

“Can I escalate this issue?”

“You tell me you’re on it, but nothing happens.”

Here’s the secret: Even when you’re ambitious and on top of things, everything takes much longer than expected — as a rule of thumb, multiply your best estimate by three.

Why so conservative? Let’s look into some real-life examples from my life as the Founder & CEO of Yonder.

Dependencies

Let’s assume you have a single task to do today, and it’s a simple task. For example, chopping firewood. Zero dependencies, right? Not quite. If your saw isn’t sharp, this task will take much longer than anticipated. You can’t sharpen the saw yourself, so you decide to go and see a specialist who can sharpen the saw for you. Once you reach the specialist’s place, it’s closed. Maybe the guy is sick, on vacation, or busy sharpening other saws for other people. Even if you promised to chop the firewood until the end of the day, you won’t be able to complete this seemingly simple task within your promised timeline.

Let’s move into more complicated tasks, like building and maintaining a B2B SaaS product. Dependencies are everywhere, both technical and organizational. It doesn’t matter if the technical dependency needs to be solved on your side, or the organizational dependency is due to an open response from a customer who happens to be out of the office because of a national holiday in a different country, a vacation, or because it’s Ramadan. Welcome to the world of doing business globally.

Different Perspectives Needed

Some tasks seem easy at first sight, but they aren’t and need a second thought. Now and then, somebody reaches out to me with a weird proposal that sounds compelling at first sight. For example, the biggest companies on the planet, like Boeing or Apple, want to partner with us, a small B2B SaaS company. Of course, they always want an immediate response if we’re in. But it pays off to first find out what exactly they are looking for and then discuss the proposal with key people on your team and your board. In almost all cases, adding those perspectives improves the decision of whether or not to pursue the proposed partnership — even when it comes at the price of a delayed decision.

Finding the Root Cause

Some problems are downright ugly. Consider software bugs that cannot be reproduced on your side, but keep occurring on the customer side.

Of course, such problems are always urgent from the customer’s perspective. And of course, we want to fix those bugs as quickly as possible. But sometimes finding the root cause that causes the bug takes way longer than what is acceptable to the customer, because the root cause is hidden deep down in an edge case of your software, or it’s because of a crazy IT security configuration on the customer’s side: Missing whitelisting, restrictive endpoint security software, blocked shaped traffic, you name it.

Even if solving such problems takes enormous amounts of time, it’s still better to fix them at the root cause level than to apply a quick fix or a hack that only adds more dependencies to your software.

Conclusion

Good solutions take time; there is no way around it. Even if people don’t want to hear that you need more time than anticipated to solve their problems, it’s fair to tell them why you need more time.

But of course, that’s not an excuse for being unorganized or not taking care of tasks quickly.

About Me

Growing a company 📈 in uncertain times 🔥🧨 is like running a marathon — it demands grit, strategy, and resilience.

As a tech entrepreneur 💻, active reserve officer 🪖, and father of three 👩👦👦, I share practical insights and write about entrepreneurship, leadership, and crisis management.

When I’m not solving problems, I recharge and find inspiration in the breathtaking mountains 🏔 around Zermatt 🇨🇭.

Do you like this perspective? Here’s what you can do next:

📌 Back the signal, not the noise — authentic stories by a person, not AI.

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